Author: Glen Jennings

Mykal Leslie staff photo

Dr. Mykal Leslie joins the Human Development Institute

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Dr. Mykal Leslie knows how to read the story that the numbers tell – and how to find the parts of the story they don’t tell. He will have plenty of opportunities to do both as the new Director of Evaluation for HDI. “We do internal and external evaluation,” Leslie said. “We make sure that people know what they’re looking for and have adequate ways to assess their progress and value”. That means working with a lot of raw data, numbers, and people. “Oftentimes, within our evaluation plans, we rely heavily on a wide range of mixed methods research,” he said. That means that Leslie and his team use a variety of ways to figure out what is best for different projects. 

Leslie said that he always liked the idea of going into a helping profession, and a mentor set him on the road of working with people with disabilities. After finishing his undergraduate studies, he did a research project about people recovering from traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and strokes. Leslie loved the work and followed it up by pursuing a master’s degree in clinical rehabilitation counseling, earning a license as a clinical mental health counselor, and completing a PHD program in counselor education and supervision. Another mentor, Dr. Phil Rumrill, currently working at HDI, led him to research grant writing and evaluation.

Leslie joins HDI from Kent State University’s Center for Disability Studies where he coordinated a master’s program for clinical rehabilitation counseling for six years.  Leslie said he’s “never really been another place that’s doing the level and quality of work that HDI is doing, and they are doing it the right way.”

Learn more about HDI’s work in research and evaluation at https://oldhdi.hdiuky.net/category/priority-area/research-evaluation.

Michelle Graham-Smith receives the Dr. Morris Grubbs Outstanding Dedication to the Graduate Student Congress Award

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Michelle Graham-Smith had a simple reason for working with the Graduate Student Congress – someone asked. A gap on the congress needed to be filled and as a grad student herself with a wealth of work experience, she was a good candidate for the spot. Now she’s found a lot about the congress she loves – and it’s led her to a lot of success in her work with it.

Graham-Smith is the winner of the Dr. Morris Grubbs Outstanding Dedication to the Graduate Student Congress Award, which celebrates leadership and dedication to the Graduate Student Congress. The Graduate Student Congress is an organization that unites, represents and advocates for the needs of graduate students at the University of Kentucky (UK).

Last year, Graham-Smith was the chair of the external affairs committee and was involved in the awards and grants committee for the congress. She was responsible for helping handle external events that may impact UK students, including writing statements about these events, and helping get students financial assistance for things like professional development, regalia and other needs. She also worked with their mentorship program. This year, she’s been elected as the organization’s secretary. Now she’s gone from working on the awards committee to receiving awards herself.

Graham-Smith was initially asked to serve on the Graduate Student Congress simply because no one else seemed willing to do it. “I always want to be that person that helps out, I want to be that person that steps in if there is a need,” Graham-Smith said. “I’m all about being able to give back and assist the community.”

And she’s had ample opportunity to do that. As a member of the congress, she’s been able to network with much of the university. This gave her an opportunity to help find resources for her fellow graduate students and a way to advocate for their needs.

It’s especially impressive since Graham-Smith hadn’t previously done anything like this.
“Whenever I first went to school, I wasn’t involved in anything,” she said. “I wasn’t involved in sororities, groups, clubs, any of that kind of stuff. This was my opportunity to be involved in the school and be involved in my educational journey.”

Her work with the Graduate Student Congress has also given her the opportunity to serve in a lot of mentorship roles. “I have had many jobs in the past. We sometimes forget about, when we first go into a position, we think we’re supposed to know everything,” “I have made mistakes in the past, and I want to recognize those mistakes but I also want to help somebody else feel more confident in their knowledge and more confident in who they are as they transition into being a professional…I’ve had people that take the time to talk to me and be honest with me in a kind, caring way that I can still reach out to them today. I want to be that type of person for somebody else.”

Thoughts from HDI’s Glen Jennings On Autism Acceptance Month

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

This April, we recognize Autism Acceptance Month. This is a month where we celebrate what autistic people are capable of and work to support mainstream acceptance of autistic people. But it’s also a time to recognize systemic obstacles to autistic people. 

And there are many. 

Think about the ways in which society has a normative model of social interaction, and all the ways in which someone who cannot follow that model might be at a disadvantage. If you’re in a job interview, not making enough eye contact to satisfy your interviewer may put you out of a job that you’d otherwise have, but forcing eye contact is often difficult for autistic people. Even against an otherwise equal neurotypical candidate, an autistic applicant is at a disadvantage through no fault of their own. Once in a job, work environments can be uninclusive. Office social structures can be difficult to navigate, office politics can leave us at a brutal disadvantage, especially among autistic people with customer-facing jobs. Factors like this are likely just one part of the reason autistic people have a catastrophically low employment rate. 

Though the social aspects of autism are the most visible to neurotypical people, there are a host of other ways that life in the workplace and beyond is challenging. Sensory issues can make it difficult to navigate the world. I always have at least two pairs of polarized sunglasses close to me because bright sunlight is hard to see in and gives me a massive headache. The general noise of loud environments with a lot of conversational buzz can quickly become overwhelming. And fluorescent lights – which are used in many offices, schools, or grocery stores – can cause headaches. Staying under them for too long is physically exhausting for me, and there are many times in my life where I’ve had no real choice but to do so. 

We navigate a world that was not built with us in mind. Acceptance Month is about moving towards one that is. 

But while that discussion is important, I think we shouldn’t end the conversation there. 

As an autistic person, I feel like I also have a lot of joy to celebrate this month. 

The national view of autism has, despite these obstacles, changed radically in the since I was diagnosed almost 25 years ago. And as someone who’s so fond of pointing out that autism isn’t all doom and gloom, it feels wrong to point only to the areas where we face obstacles. 

So I want to celebrate how far we’ve come. How people are more educated about autism in this day and age than ever before. And that only leads to better outcomes for autistic people – fewer obstacles to diagnosis, which have historically been many especially for women and people of color, more acceptance and understanding and wider access to accommodations and resources. 

The fight isn’t over, but we’ve made incredible progress. 

And more than that, I want to celebrate community. An incredible autistic community has formed over the past few decades, focusing on self-advocacy and embracing our authentic and autistic selves. 

We see the world in unique ways, we have special interests that allow us to love and appreciate the world around us with such depth, and we can bring such unique perspectives and sensibilities to the world. 

And the more we obliterate those obstacles, the more autistic people will grow to recognize and accept the potential they have. And by accepting that potential, you get a better world – whether you’re autistic or not.

This month, we celebrate autistic people. This month, we work for a future where autistic people feel heard and included, and where people value us like they would anyone else.

This article represents the opinions of the author and interviewee, not that of the University of Kentucky. 

Thoughts from HDI’s Brittany Granville On Autism Acceptance Month

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

While it’s important that autistic people have their place in society, Brittany Granville believes autism acceptance goes beyond that. She thinks it can save lives. 

“So many autistic people, particularly autistics of color, have died because people don’t understand common traits of neurodivergent people,” Granville, who works with HDI’s Innovative Supports for Autistic Workers (ISAW) project said.

And saving lives can be as simple as recognizing that just because someone acts differently than others doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them. 

“For me, autism acceptance means that there is an effort to acknowledge that some people are just different and that’s okay,” she said. “It means that you could see someone stimming or pacing back and forth in public and not automatically assume they’re on drugs or ‘up to something’ and that you need to call the police on them.”

The intersection of multiple identities among autistic people is important too, Granville said. Autistic people have consistently been proven to be more likely to have LGBTQIA+ identities, and so discrimination against one group will always harm the other. In particular, she highlighted the harm that obstacles to affirming care for transgender autistic people can cause. 

“Autistic people already have high rates of depression and suicide,” she said. “Not being able to access medication or express themselves in a way that makes them feel themselves only makes it worse.”

In addition, Granville said autistic people of color are often overlooked. 

“There’s the lack of awareness and acceptance in communities of color,” she said. “These people are often considered ‘just like that’ or ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’ are most likely neurodivergent but ignored by their communities, the medical system, schools, and often the autistic community itself.”

Across the whole community, though, Granville noted that the best thing that can be done to support autistic people to let them be themselves.

“The best thing non-autistic people can do is try being as non-judgmental of the ‘weird’ people around them,” she said. “Learn what autism is and don’t try to make us ‘less autistic.’”

And a part of that is recognizing that autism can look very different from one person to another – or even the same person, depending on the day. 

“The autism spectrum isn’t linear. No one is ‘a little autistic’ or ‘low’ or ‘high’ functioning,” she said. “An autistic person’s abilities can fluctuate widely by the day or even hour. A person can be energetic and friendly at noon and totally withdrawn and unable to talk at 6 p.m. Changes can be due to sensory input and social factors or it could just be a ‘low battery day.’”

This article represents the opinions of the author and interviewee, not that of the University of Kentucky. 

Thoughts from HDI’s Bev Harp On Autism Acceptance Month

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Bev Harp, Project Director for HDI’s Innovative Supports for Autistic Workers, remembers the days when the only rhetoric about autism was awareness rhetoric. 

And she remembers that awareness could mean radically different things to different people.

“To some people that meant being aware that autistic people exist

and that autism is a disability and needs to be accommodated. To others, it meant being aware that there are more and more of us being identified. You would see Autism Awareness buttons that said things like ‘1 in 88. Are you scared yet?’” She said. “This was the heyday of the vaccine panic, so you’d see those messages about poisoned and ruined children too. Pure fearmongering.”

In the past few years, as the number of recorded autism cases has climbed to 1 in 36, a new idea has started making the rounds. 

Instead of autism awareness, focus on autism acceptance. 

April is Autism Acceptance Month – a time for celebrating autistic people and advocating for a better world for them. And there are a few key differences between the two ideas – awareness is simply focused on knowledge of autism. One can be aware of autism. Acceptance, on the other hand, focuses on building a society that is inclusive and welcoming to autistic people. 

“We don’t need a ‘cure’ for autism, we don’t need to change autistic people so they seem more neurotypical, but what we need is to build a more equitable society where we can all thrive,” Harp said. “We are allowed to take up space and to participate in whatever facets of society we choose.”

And that means reframing the way that our society approaches autism and views autistic people. 

“We are now seeing more than 2 percent of our population fit the criteria for autism,” Harp said. “It’s time to stop thinking of autism as something to be remediated and recognize that it is and always has been one of the many natural and neutral ways to be human.”

And with that, there are many barriers to still overcome. 

“We still have around 85 percent unemployment. We still have people being tortured at the Judge Rotenberg Center and other institutions ‘for their own good.’ Kids being segregated, adults deprived of autonomy,” Harp said. “Of course, eugenics would be the ultimate form of ableism. The search for the ‘cause’ of autism has always been wrapped up in a fantasy of a world without autistic people. Somehow people can picture their autistic loved ones as still themselves yet also entirely different.” 

And while there is a lot of work to do, it is worth noting that autistic community has created a powerful shared community among autistic people. Harp said that the term autistic culture has had quite a journey over time, starting just as a term to describe art, traditions and practices common to autistic people. From there it came to represent more and more as autistic people shared more of their interests and passions. It became about those passions and how autistic people relate to them. 

“My favorite aspect of autistic culture is the pastime of taking any sort of source material (a movie, a conversation, a piece of feldspar), the simpler the better, and analyzing it and turning it over to see every angle and finding out what else in the world it echoes or connects with,” she said. “Loving a thing so much that you must attend to it properly, you must know that you’ve had every possible thought you could ever have had about it. It’s not in the nature of the thing (object, person, idea, activity), but in how an autistic person interacts with the thing.”

In the end, Harp knows understands that people calling for awareness mean well.  are sympathetic for autistic people, even when calling for awareness. She challenges those people to consider where their sympathy compassion is coming from and consider where it could be better used. 

“They see that the lives of autistic people can be tough,” Harp said. “Why is their best solution getting rid of us and not making the societal changes that would allow us all to live better lives? Why would we prefer to rewire a brain rather than change a policy? What values are we demonstrating here?

This article represents the opinions of the author and interviewee, not that of the University of Kentucky.